


keep me steady as we go

by strikinglight



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Engagement, F/M, Flashbacks, Post-Canon, Wedding Planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:10:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9793823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: When Isabella stood and crossed the room to where he sat she saw her notebook open in his lap, turned to the last page of their to-do list, all but three items crossed off with less than a month to the wedding date.License. Ceremony. Everything after.She saw the angle of his gaze, too, not on the words but straight ahead, staring blank and glassy and brittle into some invisible place she still wasn’t sure she could follow him to, yet. And yet she had been the one who’d promised to try—and to keep promising, forever and forever.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ... I don't know how many years past canon this is, so I've kept it open-ended. Please feel free to set it when you like!
> 
> Title from "Steady as We Go," by Dave Matthews Band, which to be honest would make a pretty ace wedding song.

Isabella wakes with the sun on Friday morning. The calendar on her bedside table tells her she has twenty days, and it feels like there’s still so much that needs accomplishing.

It’s always the easiest things first, the things closest at hand. That’s how she’s kept sane this past year, pretty much, for every detail she’s had to keep abreast of, every major planning decision she’s had to sign off on, every voice clamoring in concert with so many others for her attention. It’s all about teaching herself to move slowly. Little by little. A task at a time, each one diligently crossed off a list whose length she doesn’t give herself the leisure of pondering.

This morning’s agenda: Isabella puts the coffeepot on, and reads Otabek’s messages. She’d gone to bed before midnight last night, probably less than halfway through the bachelor party, but had woken up to a slew of notifications that he’d promised to send and she’d only half-expected him to deliver on—updates every hour, no gory details, just a JJ status report. _He’s okay right now. He’s a little drunk. He’s very drunk, but we’re taking care of him, don’t worry. Just got back to the hotel. They’re all in bed now. Good night, Isabella._

The latest are timestamped only ten minutes ago: _I’m up and heading to the drugstore. Ibuprofen or aspirin?_

 _Ibuprofen, he’s allergic to aspirin. Maybe some juice too in case he doesn’t make it down to the breakfast buffet._ After a pause, she follows it up with a question: _The rest still out cold?_

 _Still out cold._ Otabek types like he talks, slow and deliberate, almost toneless unless you pay close attention, but his second message is surprisingly good-humored for someone with such a solemn disposition—and someone who’s probably only running on three or four hours of sleep after what appears to have been, for all the sparseness of his account, one of those quote-unquote wild nights: _Don’t worry about it. I’ll have Emil make it up to me with breakfast._

As she pours herself a mug and watches the steam wind its way up, following the single crooked filament of it with her eyes, Isabella smiles. She remembers he’d been a surprising choice for a groomsman. Emil she’d been able to understand—he had a loud voice and an easy laugh and fit right in with Adam-from-high-school and Carter-from-the-Fraternity and most importantly JJ himself, but there was probably no one alive that she could imagine less at a stag party with those four than Otabek, physical resemblance to the groom notwithstanding.

But maybe, with a little imagination, it kind of makes sense now—JJ and Otabek Altin with the brick-wall face, shuttered behind a stalwart, impenetrable quiet. Otabek’s is the sort of quiet that could disperse a storm; Isabella thinks with no small measure of amusement of little Yuri Plisetsky, that firework, the only other friend of his that she knows. Maybe this is kind of the same thing.

 _Thanks for taking such good care of him,_ she tells him, because it’s the least she can do. When he answers _Happy to be here for you both, Isabella,_ she finds it’s not hard to believe it.

 

* * *

 

They’d done everything together, in the hectic beginning. To start with, they’d made the announcement, and roughed out the timing—a literal roughing-out, considering how long they’d squabbled about how many gold medals they were each willing to put their life together on hold for. His initial goal had been at least six—he’d had his eye on a world record, after all—but the number had been so ludicrous to Isabella that she’d thrown up her hands and told him he could maybe think about the world off the ice for once, and that he should know that anything he did was already gold to her anyway, if that mattered even a little bit.

After this little speech she’d retreated into the safe zone of the living room at his parents’ house, leaving him in his room to sulk or brood or do whatever it was he did when he was getting stuck inside his own head—but they both caved in minutes, more or less simultaneously, if the thundery way they both took to the stairs was any indication. They nearly ran full-tilt into each other at the halfway point, her on the way back up to him and him down to her, and for better or for worse the subsequent negotiations had practically made themselves. Of course it made more sense to measure the wait in years instead, medals or no medals.

“You’re right,” JJ had said on the stairs, and then two times more, “You’re right, you’re right.” Such concessions from JJ were—and still are—like digging up diamonds, but Isabella had been in the middle of telling him “I’m sorry, I won’t walk out on you again” and had barely heard him say the words.

 

* * *

  

She’s behind the wheel when Emil calls, driving the half hour down to city hall to pick up a marriage license.

“Ciao, Bella!” She has her phone plugged into the stereo, so the sound of him singing out her name echoes all around her, filling the car from floor to ceiling. “Beka told me you’d want to know that we’ve managed to get your man into the shower.”

If memory serves, the last word from ‘Beka’ had come in at around seven-thirty. A quick glance at the clock on the dashboard tells her it’s past nine. All told it’s about what she’d been expecting; regular JJ has an internal alarm clock that wakes him up so early that most days he somehow manages to one-up even the sun, but JJ nursing a hangover moves at a pace for which the only appropriate descriptive word is “glacial.” And has the range of motion of a glacier to match. “The hotel gave you bath mats, I hope?”

“Of course. And we’ve got Adam in the doorway to make sure he doesn’t slip and crack his head open.”

 _Oh, good,_ Isabella almost says, until the logistics of such an arrangement manage to sink in. “... You’re watching JJ shower?”

“ _He’s_ watching JJ shower,” Emil says, matter-of-fact. Even as she listens she turns part of her attention to the hum of the hotel room behind his voice, safe-enough background noise—ESPN on the TV, someone’s phone ringing, the occasional yell of “JJ!” more exasperated than panicked, which is always a good sign. “You’d want a guard at the door too if you saw how hard it was to get him up a while ago. We were threatening to set his hair on fire and still no dice, just imagine.”

That makes her laugh, because she doesn’t need to. She’s been there. “That’s going to be the rest of my life, remember?”

The silence on the other end tells her that the phrase “the rest of my life” has fallen as heavily on Emil’s head as it still does on hers, sometimes, when she stops to think about it.

“...You’re _right_ ,” he breathes, like a revelation. She can practically see him scratching at his head, working his already untameable hair into a bird’s nest. “Shit. Right. Gosh, I’ll pray for you. Though I’m sure you won’t need it; it’ll probably be straight to heaven for you when you die.”

“I hope so,” she offers, smiling out at the red light she’s stopped at. “I try my best.” It’s good to be gracious, but if there’s anything she’s learned from all these years with JJ—and facing the prospect of many more, so many they’re impossible to count—it’s that there’s nothing charming about false modesty.

 

* * *

 

In the months that followed, of course, there had been other negotiations, pages and pages in Isabella’s planning notebook of food allergies and possible venues, phone numbers, hypothetical table arrangements, lists of expenses. Pins by the hundreds on their joint Pinterest board. Maybe it was only fitting that one of their longest, most drawn-out arguments had been about aesthetics—more to the point, how JJ had wanted to cover everything at the reception venue in gold. Isabella, even with no small measure of reinforcement from Pinterest and from both their mothers, had still needed two days to argue it down to a more subdued palette. Pale yellow, ivory, dove-grey—and _some_ gold, to prove that she wasn’t above compromise.

“But gold is us, Bella.” Here he’d folded his arms and puffed up his chest for—entirely unnecessary—emphasis. With this as with all things JJ was about as understated as a bulldozer.  “You said so yourself.”

“Gold is _you,_ I said,” she’d replied tartly, mirroring him with her own arms. She had lost count, at this point, of how many times she’d been told that she was the only person who could match him movement for movement. Or, rather, the only one who cared to try. “That’s why it’s not the only color.”

She had started the Pinterest board, but within less than a month it had become his baby, and after two he’d memorized the difference between samite and sarsenet, and the flower language meaning of every flower endemic to Canada besides. She knew he’d rather hang up his skates than admit to enjoying that kind of thing, but it was hard not to notice how he grumbled about their daily Pinterest Hour heaps less than calling suppliers or rearranging the guest list. And if nothing else it gave him something to do to center himself that wasn’t shredding his nails with his teeth.

Before too long it had become second nature to Isabella to put her laptop in his hands the millisecond she saw them start to curl and fidget, leave him with some general instruction while she spoke with the wedding planner on the phone. “Bouquets, please, JJ,” or “dresses for the entourage, JJ,” after which she’d walk out of the room and come back ten minutes later to find him with twenty open tabs—but breathing just a little easier, fidgeting that much less. In return she made it a point to go through every pin, one by one, nodding and “hmmm”-ing in all the appropriate places, even if a removed observer would have said that you could get excited about only so many near-identical bunches of yellow roses and babies’ breath .

It had been JJ’s mother who’d later remarked that the colors they’d chosen were “so them”—at which Isabella had caught JJ’s eye over her shoulder and winked, suddenly ten feet tall in her imagination, looking down from the top of a podium that in every other instance would have been _his_ place.

 

* * *

 

The clerk at city hall wears a ring on her left hand too. It’s the first thing Isabella notices, after the name on the tag pinned to the front of her blouse—Michelle, in narrow black letters—when she reaches out to take the folder of documents Isabella passes across the counter along with two pieces of ID.

As this Michelle studies their birth certificates and certificates of residency, Isabella studies her. Brisk, blonde, a thin unsmiling face and the rest of her all ponytailed and pinstriped efficiency. Even the ring is severe, the silver band undecorated with anything but the tiniest crumb of crystal. All told, not the kind of person you’d easily be able to imagine planning a wedding, let alone actually being wed.

Isabella tells herself she’s old enough to know now that it’s not true that love casts a glamor over everything. She’s never thought of the bridal glow as anything more than the natural result of an extra-healthy diet and skillful makeup artistry on the day itself—by now she’s fairly sure whatever luminescence might have hung about her person back when she was first proposed to at nineteen will have dissipated, and she still doesn’t know too many new brides to check this theory against. One of the more inconvenient things, she supposes, about always running at the head of the pack.

This is the part no one makes movies about. Michelle hands the papers back, then Isabella’s driver’s license and her passport, and after that a form she’s to present at the cashier’s office along with the application fee. She says “Sign here, please,” taps a fingertip against the dotted line at the bottom of the page. And then, like a blessing, she smiles—and when she adds “Happy wedding,” Isabella can see it a little, the candles and the crystal all lit up inside her.

“You too, Michelle,” she says, and signs, and then she can hear the music. Here her mind fills in the words, unbidden: _Michelle, ma belle, these are words that go together well, my Michelle._

 

* * *

 

No one believes her when she tells them it’s the days when nothing is happening that are hardest for him. Or maybe it’s that they don’t believe that he, too, has days when nothing happens, nothing moves. Who could believe that of someone who lives like he could eat the world raw? But Isabella knows the truth is something else.

She doesn’t have to think back far; it’s enough to remember last Thursday at nine in the evening, her at the dining table finishing up some work, him on his phone on the couch. Not much had happened that day, but she’d still heard it—the precise moment the air changed, when his breaths began to follow a frequency she had by now become an expert at listening for.

When Isabella stood and crossed the room to where he sat she saw her notebook open in his lap, turned to the last page of their to-do list, all but three items crossed off with less than a month to the wedding date. _License. Ceremony. Everything after._ She saw the angle of his gaze, too, not on the words but straight ahead, staring blank and glassy and brittle into some invisible place she still wasn’t sure she could follow him to, yet. And yet she had been the one who’d promised to try—and to keep promising, forever and forever.

She’d said nothing, then. Instead her hand—always the left one, always the hand that wore the ring—had reached out to hold his shoulder, feeling the muscle taut and the bone curving beneath her palm, the aggressive upward slant. No words for any of those things—just the one touch, and what warmth she held in the rest of her seeping through her skin into the rest of him, as she stood behind him and waited for him to come back.

He hadn’t had anything to say either—wordless as only she knew he could be sometimes, once in a very rare while—when he reached up and covered that hand with one of his own, squeezing the bones of her fingers together. It had been enough that he hadn’t let go of that hand as she pulled him up and led him gently out of her apartment and down the darkened corridor to the elevator, all the way across the parking garage to the car she’d been driving him home in for years.

 

* * *

 

She knows he’s in good hands. Time and again she’s promised both herself and him that she’s not going to be a helicopter-fiancée, and she’s proud of herself for holding (mostly!) to that promise for the tenure of their Very Long Engagement, but she’s also idling at a red light. And hyper-aware of the slip of paper tucked into the inside pocket of her purse, because it just doesn’t make sense for something so small and flimsy to also be so symbolically weighty. It’s the key to their future— _License. Ceremony. And everything after._

It always takes him a few rings to pick up when he’s in company. She knows it’s because he needs time to remove himself. Step offstage, in a sense, so they can speak freely. Ever-patient, she waits, watching the stoplight through the windshield and counting.

It’s four rings before she hears his voice. “Bella?”

He calls her name this way sometimes. Like a question, in the voice of the person he becomes when no one else is around to see and misunderstand. The sound is echoing oddly in her ears, bouncing around in an enclosed space she recognizes immediately as four tiled walls and a floor. It’s not the first time he’s ducked into a bathroom to talk to her—they’re easy places to hide, when you have nowhere else.

He sounds tight in the throat, raw and raspy. It’s a bad habit of his not to drink enough water on the heels of a hangover; one of the many reasons why he can’t entirely be relied on to nurse himself. When he hangs up the call and rejoins his friends—she has to say the word over to herself, smiling to know that that’s what they are, even if he won’t admit it—she knows he’ll be too preoccupied with demonstrating how okay he is, how thoroughly breakfast and a shower have healed him. So she makes a mental note to send another message to Otabek instead, to remind him to hydrate—or just to keep shoving glasses of water into his hands, so he has no choice.

But for now, there’s something she needs to tell him that she can’t course through anybody else.

“I just left city hall.” She hears the sound of her own voice ringing in her ears, and thinks of victory. “You have twenty days to change your mind.”

If this were any other conversation he’d have jumped onto the ends of her sentences by now. Naturally anyone but her would take the long pause on the other end of the line as a warning sign, a red flag. How strange for JJ to be anything less than whip-quick with his answers, how unlike JJ to think before speaking (!), something must be wrong—but she knows the truth is something else. She trusts that he knows what things to slow down for, so she steps into his silence, and waits.

JJ never hesitates. He’s only practicing his lines, the better to deliver on what he’s promised when the time comes to perform.

“I’m all in,” he says at last, in no uncertain terms. That should be the end of it, until he surprises her and bends, invites her into the spotlight that at the end of the day is theirs to share. “At least if you are.”

Her answering laugh as the light goes green and she steps on the gas is just one of many yeses—not the first, and by no means the last.


End file.
